The Burlington Magazine: The latest issue features the upcoming 150th anniversary of Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery in 2027, honors the career of late Victoria and Albert Museum jewelry curator Richard Edgcumbe, and reviews the monumental realism and modernist influence of nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Courbet.

Liverpool 2027

The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool will be 150 years old in 2027. It was named after the local brewer Andrew Barclay Walker (1824–93), who donated £20,000 for the creation of the gallery. It opened in September 1877 and welcomed over 300,000 visitors during the next four months. Walker was not a collector of art but appears to have displayed an aesthetic sensibility through the high standards he insisted on for the design of his public houses. read more

Richard Edgcumbe (1951–2026)

A gifted curator who specialised in jewellery, Richard Edgcumbe pursued a successful career at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and notably published on gold chasing in the eighteenth century. read more

I, Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet (1819–77) was arguably the most important artist in nineteenth-century France. Over almost four decades, he created paintings of monumental achievement and innovation in all genres and changed how art was exhibited and sold – mostly in Paris, the capital of the international art world. He launched an aesthetic of realism that emphasised painterly facture and set the stage for modernist art in the decades that followed. read more